Because scholarly editing takes a great deal of time, is often tedious, requires meticulous care over masses of minute detail, involves decisions that can easily go wrong, is seldom rewarded by wealth or early promotions, and because every fifty years or less some new hot shot editor comes along demanding that the work scholarly editors have been doing needs complete overhaul and replacement – because so little reward seems to come from so much investment of time and intelligence, I am led to ask: Why do we create scholarly editions, why do we spend our time and our lives in this way?

This chapter has three main sections. The first, called “The everlasting no,” rehearses a variety of motives for scholarly editing that have been or should be discarded: they include hagiolatry, monument building, cultural preservation, and cultural engineering. Section II, called “The center of indifference,” addresses what we lose and what we gain by discarding the high sounding but weak, false, and decayed motives rehearsed in Section I. And Section III, called, ironically enough, “The everlasting yea,” presents some conclusions about what scholarly editing, stripped of its pretensions, actually can and should strive to achieve.